Celebrations among Iranian diaspora communities. Pledges of revenge from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Urgent statements from European capitals calling for restraint. And, underneath it all, the assumption in Washington that removing a brutal leader is the hard part, and that what follows will somehow sort itself out. It will not. History tells us so, repeatedly and at enormous human cost.
The Iraq Precedent
Saddam Hussein’s record needed no embellishment: chemical weapons used against Kurdish civilians at Halabja, the invasion of Kuwait, decades of systematic repression. When he was executed in December 2006, three years after the U.S. led invasion that toppled his regime, there were those who genuinely believed the worst was over. American policymakers spoke of democratic transformation rippling across the Middle East.
What followed was catastrophic. Dismantling the Baathist state, its military, its civil service, its entire security apparatus, left a vacuum that nobody was prepared to fill. Sectarian violence between Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communities erupted with a ferocity that the old regime had suppressed but never resolved. Al Qaeda in Iraq grew from the wreckage and eventually became the Islamic State. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Millions fled. And Iran, the very country Washington now finds itself at war with, emerged as the dominant outside power in Iraqi politics, filling precisely the space that American intervention had cleared for it.
The lesson is not that Saddam should have stayed. It is that removing a tyrant without any serious plan for what comes next tends to produce something worse, not better.
The Libyan Lesson
Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years through a combination of ideology, tribal patronage, and brute force. His regime’s alleged involvement in international terrorism, including the 1988 Lockerbie bombing for which Libya ultimately accepted responsibility and paid compensation to victims’ families, had made him a fixture on Western sanctions lists for decades. When the Arab Spring gave Libyan rebels their opening, NATO’s air campaign helped finish the job. Gaddafi was captured and killed in a drainage ditch in Sirte in October 2011.
Fifteen years later, Libya is a failed state. It has two rival governments, a patchwork of competing militias, and has become a transit point for weapons that have fueled insurgencies across the Sahel. Open slave markets operated on its territory. The weapons Gaddafi stockpiled were looted and dispersed across the region. A country that was at least functional under his repressive hand became ungovernable without him.
Iran Is Bigger Than Khamenei
This is where Iran is being fundamentally misread. The Islamic Republic is not a personalist dictatorship like Saddam’s Iraq or Gaddafi’s Libya, where power was concentrated in one man and his immediate circle. It is an institutional system with multiple power centers: the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the judiciary, and above all the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, each with its own interests, its own finances, its own constituencies, and its own survival instincts that have nothing to do with who sits at the top.
The IRGC alone has 190,000 personnel, controls large chunks of the Iranian economy, and runs the country’s ballistic missile program. It commands the Houthi movement in Yemen and Shia militia networks from Baghdad to Beirut. Hezbollah has been badly degraded by Israel’s campaign, its senior leadership largely eliminated. But the rest of Iran’s regional network is intact. The commanders are alive. The weapons are there. And the ideology, revolutionary Shia Islam mixed with Persian nationalism and deep anti-American grievance, did not die with Khamenei. It will find new vehicles, very likely ones that are more radical and less open to any form of engagement than the clerical establishment that is now gone.
There is a real possibility that what replaces Khamenei is not a more moderate Iran but an Iran where the IRGC, freed from the moderating friction of clerical deliberation, runs the show entirely. That is not a better outcome. It is a more dangerous one.
What Comes Next
The strikes were conducted without congressional authorization, in the middle of ongoing nuclear negotiations, and without any visible plan for the morning after. Washington appears to be betting on a rapid transition to a pro-Western government, perhaps built around exiled opposition figures. American policymakers made the same bet on post-Saddam Iraq and post-Gaddafi Libya. In both cases there were no credible, organized political alternatives waiting in the wings, and the result was not democratic transition but fragmentation and violence. There is no reason to think Iran will be different, and considerable reason to think it will be harder, given how deeply the IRGC is embedded in the state.
The suffering of those who lived under Khamenei’s theocracy is real and should not be minimized. But there is a bitter irony in the logic of the devil we know. The familiar devil, however brutal, operates within a known framework, pursues recognizable interests, and can, however reluctantly, be engaged. What comes after operates under none of those constraints. Removing a tyrant is not a policy. It is the beginning of a much harder problem, one that Washington has now handed to the rest of the world to manage alongside it, without having asked whether anyone else was ready.
Dr. Nikolaos Lampas, Associate Professor of International Relations and European Affairs, The American College of Greece
